Monday 3 July 2017

Winter solstice goat from Macedon

This is silver stater from Aigai (today's Vergina), the first capital of Macedon, depicting an ibex goat, late 6th century BC, currently kept in Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. 




Please note the sun disc above the goat. Remember the link between the ibex goat, the Capricorn zodiac sign and the winter solstice that I explained in my post "Goat"?

Here is the important bit:

Alpine ibex mating season starts in December, and ends in January typically lasting around six weeks. 

Right in the middle of the mating periods of both Alpine and Bezoar ibex is Winter Solstice, 21st of December. And the day after the winter solstice is the beginning of the Capricorn (goat) period, which last from December 22 – January 20...

The solar disc on the coin is placed right above the middle of the goat, symbolizing the winter solstice which falls in the middle of the ibex mating season. 

The solar disc is the symbol found all over the world and in Egypt it was the symbol of the sun, Ra. 

I wrote about this symbol in my post "Bogovo gumno - God's threshing floor". 

I proposed that this symbol represents a stylized threshing floor. 




There are thousands of these stone circles all over the Balkans. Every village and sometimes every house had one. Sometimes they are made of stone, where stone was plentiful, but sometimes they were just a flat piece of land with a stick stack into the middle of it.

In 1950, Serbian ethnographer Nenad Janković published a book on folk astronomy called "Astronomija u predanjima, obicajima i umotvorinama Srba" (Astronomy in legends, customs and oral and written tradition of the Serbs). In it he expressed his great surprise at the ability of ordinary illiterate peasants to tell exact date and time without calendars and clocks. Professor Jankovic states that one of the main instruments used for these calendar and time calculations was the threshing floor. By looking at the shadow cast by the stožer, the central pole at sunrise, they were able to tell the date. And by looking at the shadow cast by the stožer, the central pole during the day they were able to tell the time. Threshing floor is a universal solar observatory, which at the same time can tell the date and the time. The main parts of this solar observatory were solar circle and its center, solar pole, stožer. Or if viewed from above, from heaven, the way Sun God would see it, a circle and a dot representing its center, solar pole, stožer. 



The aboe symbol is usually interpreted to mean sun disc, but I believe that it actually means sun circle, threshing floor and sun cycle observed from the threshing floor.

Greeks called the central solar pole, stožer of the sundial "gnomon" meaning the one which knows. This was because the central stake "new" the time and date.

The same symbol is found engraved on many megalithic monuments where it is known as "cup and ring mark". 


I wrote about these "mysterious" marks in my posts "Rebirth" and "Sun mountain" where I proposed that these were solar symbols, representing a solar year. 

By the way, Aigai means "The city of goats" :)




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